UM professor invited to tea with the queen Events to mark Jamestown’s 400 years

Not everybody is invited to have tea with the queen, but University of Maine anthropology professor Alaric Faulkner was on his way Thursday to do just that.

“It’s not really tea, although it will be served,” Faulkner said by telephone during his drive to Jamestown, Va.

Faulkner has been involved in the Jamestown Rediscovery Project since 1994 and was invited to a reception planned for today which Queen Elizabeth II is scheduled to attend.

It’s all part of the 400th anniversary celebration of the founding of Jamestown, Va.

Just as St. Croix Island at Calais can claim to be the site of the first French settlement – at least a temporary settlement – in North America, Jamestown, founded in 1607, is acknowledged as the first permanent English settlement in North America.

“I’ll be seeing her tomorrow with a group of a dozen other archaeologists and maybe as many as 500 other invited guests,” Faulkner said from the road, estimating that he was only 26 miles from his hotel in Williamsburg, Va.

Queen Elizabeth arrived Thursday for the commemoration of Jamestown’s 400th anniversary and praised the cultural changes that have occurred since she last visited America’s first permanent English settlement 50 years ago, The Associated Press reported.

The last time the queen helped Virginia mark the anniversary of its Colonial founding, it was an all-white affair in a still-segregated state. Thursday’s visit was starkly different.

“Over the course of my reign and certainly since I first visited Jamestown in 1957, my country has become a much more diverse society just as the commonwealth of Virginia and the whole United States of America have also undergone a major social change,” the queen said in a speech to the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond, the first stop on her visit.

Hundreds of people stood in lines for hours in a cool drizzle, some since dawn, to enter the grounds of the freshly refurbished 219-year-old Capitol.

The queen planned to meet with leaders of Virginia’s Indian tribes at the Capitol and to have a private audience with survivors of last month’s massacre at Virginia Tech and families of some of the 32 who were slain.

On Thursday evening, the queen was expected to take a horse-drawn carriage ride through Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia’s capital.

On Friday, she is to tour the site of Jamestown and attend a reception to which Faulkner has been invited.

Because of intense security, Faulkner didn’t receive his invitation until last week.

“So I dropped everything and here I am,” he said.

Faulkner was aware that the queen had visited Jamestown in 1957. “At that time, though, the original fort hadn’t been discovered and it was celebrated at a reconstruction,” he said.

Since then, the original settlement has been found and more than 3 million artifacts unearthed.

“If history is any indication, we’ll have an ongoing team excavating one of the wells at Jamestown as the queen is visiting, and we very well may uncover some new materials,” Faulkner said. “I’m sure that there will be some surprises. There always have been every time I have gone down and I don’t anticipate it will be any less with the queen.”

Faulkner has participated in excavation at the Jamestown site. He noted that Maine has a sister site in Phippsburg, Maine.

“It’s been excavated simultaneously with Jamestown,” he said.

Unlike the long-standing English settlement in Jamestown, which was an early capital of Virginia, the Maine colony didn’t last.

“Everybody went home for a number of reasons,” Faulkner said. He explained that the Phippsburg colony’s leader and its financial backer died.

The actual anniversary of Jamestown isn’t until May 14, but this was when the queen had time available to visit.

The royal couple is due at the Kentucky Derby on Saturday and will visit President Bush in Washington next week.

The queen also will visit NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the National World War II Memorial in Washington before heading home on Tuesday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.